Directing
Spring 2020: in Mexico City, a group of friends get together to rehearse a play. They gradually find themselves connected to the history of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán valley, home to the world’s largest cactus forest. Somewhere between a phantasmagorical fiction and a historical investigation, Ollin Blood challenges our relationship with nature and all its contradictions.
On the visual layer 'In Uranias' is like a diary film made while travelling through Iran and USA in early 2007. The text layer is more like a journey through the emotional landscapes of an iranian-american muslim. These two layers are intertwined - sometimes converging, sometimes diverging - to create an audio-visual anagram: Uranias.
In the night, between human and plant silhouettes, the old stories we tell each other give birth to new ones.
BACK TO 2069 looks at the eroded landscape of the Greek militarized Aegean island Lemnos, a political space where a myth meets contemporary concerns upon the relation of virtual and real image production. There a solitary man shape-shifts from argonaut to avatar through various hallucinations, experiencing different states of embodiment and disembodiment. Although he exiled himself from Athens to escape the crisis, past and future scenarios of conflict are gradually catching up on him. What appears to be a fiction is made out of documentary footage that interweaves the man's venture on the island with recorded Arma 3 video-game sessions from Youtube.
A young woman in Tokyo links the mysterious death of a journalist to the Hashimoto experiment that attempted to teach a cactus the alphabet. Fiction and documentary alternate freely, using various film formats.
Three young men, two brothers and their cousin, meet on a dense summer night to feel the "high" of a dozen "Hasiklidika" songs, Rebetiko songs from the beginning of the 20th century which celebrate the effects of Hashish. But beyond the pleasures of drugs, it is here question of love, joy and sadness, search for freedom and political commitment - Little by little yesterday's counter-culture, made out of poverty and violence, and built on the pains of exile, reverberates the one of today.
The county of Yoknapatawpha cannot be found with the aid of maps; it is the invention of the American author William Faulkner, and the setting of his classic novels. Tracing its tracks into the present, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky conjure a vanished landscape, saturated in its sultry atmosphere and eidetic visions.
